Food Wastage is third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after the United States and China [View all]

... Food that is produced but then thrown away before being eaten causes not only economic losses of nearly £500 billion every year, but also affects the climate, water, land and biodiversity... "Without accounting for greenhouse gas emissions from land use change, the carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is estimated at 3.3 Gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of CO2 equivalent: as such, food wastage ranks as the third top emitter after the USA and China."

The report also reveals that uneaten food occupies 1.4 billion hectares of land - about 30 percent of the world's agricultural land area, and that rotting food is a large producer of the power greenhouse gas methane...

... Alongside the study, the FAO has also published recommendations on how to reduce food waste all along the food chain, and has provided case studies of projects around the world aiming to address the problem.

11 September 2013, Rome - The waste of a staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year is not only causing major economic losses but also wreaking significant harm on the natural resources that humanity relies upon to feed itself, says a new FAO report.

Among its key findings: Each year, food that is produced but not eaten guzzles up a volume of water equivalent to the annual flow of Russia's Volga River and is responsible for adding 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases to the planet's atmosphere.

And beyond its environmental impacts, the direct economic consequences to producers of food wastage (excluding fish and seafood) run to the tune of $750 billion annually, FAO's report estimates.

"All of us - farmers and fishers; food processors and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers -- must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can't," said FAO Director-General Josť Graziano da Silva...